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Aug 15, 2011 By Frank Valish Merle Haggard

It’s been a while, but excepting a slight title change to this blog, we’re back. And this time, we headed down to rural Lancaster, PA to see legendary country music performer Merle Haggard at the American Music Theater. The AMT is the kind of place where artists park their busses in the parking lot out back and concertgoers bring all sorts of merchandise (photos, guitars, records) to get the artists to sign as they sneak in and out the back door. Tonight was no exception, and the throngs of mostly older fans waited, caution tape holding them back, for the master to exit his van prior to the show.

Haggard is one of the original country music icons, on par with Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, and Waylon Jennings as far as blazing a trail in the 1960s and ‘70s. He sang about prisoners on death row, criminals returning from jail, love, and of course, drinking. Some of these topics were not exactly typical to country music 50 years ago, and, as he boasted before performing this song at AMT, his classic “Okie from Muskogee” included one of the first mentions of marijuana on radio. So while Haggard is country, this is not exactly Taylor Swift territory.

After his backing band, The Strangers, performed a few numbers without him, Haggard walked on stage to the sound of an anonymous PA announcer urging audience members to visit Haggard’s merch stand, something of a portable souvenir shop set up in the lobby that resembled something like a mini-Cracker Barrel of Haggard with its dozens of hats, shirts, license plates, and various and sundry other Haggard paraphernalia. The first number, his 1965 drinking song “Swinging Doors,” shattered any preconceptions that this night would be a nostalgic rehash or bloated money grab. After the song, the 74-year-old performer graciously tipped his hat to the audience and continued through a 75-minute set that spanned his five-decade career.

Despite his age, Haggard seemed at the peak of his powers, his deep, rich voice having only gotten better with age. He’s as adept a guitarist and fiddle player as ever, and he led his 9-piece bluegrass band masterfully, providing nonverbal encouragement to younger band mates and nodding with approval at a fine run on the piano or slide guitar. The classics were played (the timeless “Mama Tried” was met with great crowd approval), and he covered Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues,” topical for Haggard as the singer famously did time in San Quentin during his youth. But Haggard has a new album out this Fall, for which he wrote much of the material himself (unlike Cash’s late-period covers albums), and Haggard looked most young and lively on the album’s title track, “Working in Tennessee.”

Though the crowd didn’t much care about his politics (when he asked whether Congress passed the debt ceiling increase, one audience member simply hollered, “Who cares?”), they seemed to know every word to every song. One particular individual, sitting cattycorner to me, proudly donned a cap emblazoned with the patriotic lyrics “If you don’t love it, leave it,” from Haggard’s “Fightin’ Side of Me.”

The master was in jovial form on this evening as well, joking about his age (“Most of these songs are older than I am,” and “Most of these songs I wrote in my 20s, and here I am in my 40s still trying to pull it off”) as well as his voluminous recorded output (“I made 80 [albums], and some of them are pretty good”). And though the show ended well before the clock struck 11 PM and, to the disappointment of the approximately 30-odd faithful standing around at his bus after the show, Haggard did not return to sign autographs and take pictures afterward, the man showed unlimited love of life and song onstage.

As he sang in “Back to Earth,” his 2009 duet with Willie Nelson: “Tonight I’ll sing for everything I’m worth.” On this night he did just that. And it was plenty.

(merlehaggard.com)